Make the ‘Issues’ your own.

   Having decided to vote the next problem is how do you decide on who to vote for. What do you want your polititians to do for you and who can you trust to do it?

    With your schedule you have no time to research the background of the local Candidate or go to the ‘town hall’ meetings and chances are that you are still at work or taking the kids somewhere when they come calling at the door. That leaves you with the television news or the feeds on your home page which are all about what the leaders say and do and are of course very selective.

   Opinion Polls you say but the big lesson from the last Federal Election was that opinion polls are not worth a heap of coon shit.

   This brings us to the ‘issues’. The polititians would like you to focus on their version of the issues, but what do you think are the real issues affecting your world, your future and ,more importantly, your childrens future.

    What are you being offered by the various political factions? 

    If you want to get rich, pay less taxes, have access to private health care, continue to pollute the environment without being penalised and generally ignore the well being of fellow citizens, Vote Conservative.

   If you want to elliminate all forms of private health care, pull our troops out of Afghaniatan, pay more taxes and penalise polluters, Vote NDP.

   If you want to have the impression that you can have all of these things, Vote Liberal.

   Voting is like being on a jury, you are not trying to establish the absolute truth, only a reasonable doubt and if you are a reasonable person you will surely doubt what the professional politicians are telling you.

   So where do you get the information from to enable you to make a reasonably informed decision?

Do you really want to vote

Canadian Election Week 2

   At the begining of Week 1 I asked the question of Generation Y “who do you want to vote for?”. A better question would have been “do you really want to vote?”.

    The experience of most voters is that once the politicians have our votes and are safely ensconced in Ottawa, they get back to their own agenda which appears to have very little connection with ours. Take health care for instance. So why bother to vote?

   Two groups have the potential to affect your lives in a major way, the Government and your employer. The great majority of you can have no influence on who owns and/or manages the organisation you work for. You are powerless, the owner can hire and fire you and you have very little chance of becoming an owner. However you can have a say in the formation of your Government. You should not pass-up an opportunity to hire and fire your politicians because they can have an influence on your employers.

   So, back to the original question, “who do you want to vote for?”

To do or not to do, that is still the question.

    Having elected a Government with a feminine bias it is necessary to set an agenda for them with an order of priority.

#1 The Environment.

     Reduction of carbon emissions is the overwhelming #1 priority. But we also need to educate ourselves about all the other environmental issues that must be dealt with and all the damage we are doing with our profligate lifestyle.

     Our over consumption demands destructive mining and extraction activities of all kinds. Destructive farming and food production techniques, over fishing of wild fish stocks, reckless fish farming that can seriously harm the wild fish population, etc. The list is extensive and needs to be highlighted and dealt with in a serious manner.

    What to do;   Introduce the Liberals Carbon Tax,  restore the GST to 8% to discourage consumption, negotiate a ban on all factory ship fishing and do all these things now.

#2 Health Care.

    Wait times are getting longer not shorter and our bureaucrats are burying the facts in spin and statistics. We are paying through the nose for prescription drugs and we are still chewing down anti-biotics as if they were ju-jubes.

   What to do; Cancel all educational debts of Doctors, Nurses, and other trained medical professionals and get those who have left the country for better paying jobs to come home. Pay bonuses to those who are prepared to work in rural or less attractive locations. This will be less expensive in the long run than paying the medical bills of an aging population whose health is deteriorating by the hour because of lack of treatment.

     Cut off all direct private health care initiatives as they deprive the public system of much needed resources. Engage the private sector to run our health care system on an effective and efficient basis.

     Form a National drug procurement plan to beat drug company prices down to a fair level. Again, engage private industry to run it effectively.

      Educate Doctors on the dangers of continued excessive prescription of anti-biotics. Reward Doctors who show restaint.

 

    #3 Child poverty.

    Child poverty is directly linked to parent poverty particularly single parent poverty who fall under the description of ‘working poor’. This is related to the distortion in the distribution of wealth in our society which has been caused by the failure of the ‘trickle down effect’.

    What to do; Re-direct wealth to the poorer segments of our society using the tax system. Roll back all Corporate tax reductions implemented by the last two governments and increase marginal tax rates for the upper tax brackets whist lower or eliminating taxes for the lower income brackets.

    Provide more affordable day care spaces for those parents who prefer to go to work rather than stay home to raise children. Increase the wages, significantly, for all qualified day care workers.

     (See also the section on Corporate governance.)

    Afghanistan.

      This war cannot be won. Withdraw our troops now and restore Canada’s reputation as a peace keeper. The money that is being spent on this futile war can be better spent on improving the lives of the poor both here and in Afghanistan.

     I know that there are people who will be resentful that their loved ones died in vain but the alternative is for a few more Canadians to die in vain not to mention all those whose lives are destroyed by injuries.

    Corporate governance.

What to do;

    Remove the right for Corporations to be treated as equivalent to a human being in law. They do not behave with the morals of human beings therefore they should not be treated as our equals.       

     Legislate a cap to executive compensation with the maximum being a multiple of the earnings of the lowest paid employee.

    Negotiate benefits for organisations that are prepared to help employees fund medical, educational and retirement plans.

    In my next post I will discuss the accounting for this proposed action plan.

Free education pays for itself.

     It has been proved over and over again that educated Citizens add value to society. Educated citizens are in the main healthier, are inclined to be more productive and less inclined to commit crimes. All of these attributes benefit our society and reduce the costs of living and of doing business. So why would we put barriers in the way of citizens who want to become educated?

     There are several types of barriers to getting an education. Lack of motivation, lack of opportunity but the greatest barrier is expense which can have a significant effect on the other two.

     Why, when we know that having educated citizens will improve our lifestyles significantly, do we expect our younger generations to mortgage their futures to get an education. We never had to (and by ‘We’ I mean the Boomers and previous generations) , my education up to a degree level was to all intents and purposes free. What right have I to expect Generation Y and future generations to pay for an education that will clearly benfit me? The only reason that we make them pay is so that we can go on ‘living The Lifestyle’, a pretentious and meaningless expression.

     Its time to cancel all student debt, bring our educated young professionals home so that we, not the wealthy Americans, can benefit from their education.

    Its time to eliminate all college and University tuition fees so that our young citizens can focus on getting an education instead of driving themselves into the ground trying to learn whilst holding down jobs.

    Its time to fund our Universities generously so that they do not have to prostitute themselves before Corporate USCAN and have to publish corporate propaganda instead of genuine research results.

   Its time to make the Corporate world pay for the education that they will use to generate profits and line the pockets of high rolling CEO’s.

    The problem that you voters in this 2008 Canadian election have is that not one of the Parties is paying any serious attention to the cost of education. Your Mom would, hasn’t she always pushed you and supported you in you efforts to get an education.

  VOTE FOR SOMEONE LIKE YOUR MOM!

For related ideas see the following posts:

18 September ‘Get a job, loose your freedom’.

22 September ‘Would you vote for your Mom’.

24 September ‘Embracing feminine values’.

27 September ‘Yeah! we wanted a minority Government’.

Economics 101 or can we trust the ‘Economy’ to the Economists?

    Our financial system has tanked again and we are faced with another recession. What happened?

     The simple answer is that someone took more than they were entitled to out of our financial system. Was it the folks who borrowed large amounts of money to finance homes and cars that they could not afford or, was it the folks who sold those risky loans to unsuspecting third parties to make a quick buck.

     It’s a familiar story, the greedy among us found ways to by-pass the checks and balances that had been put in place after similar meltdowns in the not too distant past. The system this time was called Globalism, a.k.a Corporatism, a.k.a. Capitalism. We were persuaded that if we removed the controls on the movement of capital, i.e money, we would all make lots of money. Of course the rich would make a lot of money first and give the rest of us our share by a mechanism called ‘the trickle down effect’. However, because there was not enough money around for the everyone to take their share up front the system crashed. We are now being told that there are still too many restrictions to allow the money to trickle anyway but up and so the poorer folks have to put more money into the system to make it work.

     Now this system was devised by the economists who, with the aid of right wing politicians, have promised the rest of us that it would lead us to the economists promised land but usually leads to cloud-cuckoo land and from there it is downhill all the way to either tyranny or revolution, and I don’t mean going round and round.

      As I said it is a familiar story. Back in the day around 600BC, yes thats 2700 years ago, the Greek aristocracy who owned the land by birthright took so much from the peasant farmers that they had to take on slavery as a second job and that didn’t leave them any time for farming. As a result the aristocracy wasn’t getting any returns from their land. They had to be banged on the head by a  guy named Solon, himself an aristocrat, before they would let go. Solon cancelled all the peasants debts and put the middle class land owners in charge of the government and so freed up the locked down financial system. Sound familiar?

     Of course that system didn’t hold the rich and greedy for long and by 1215 the English Barons had to bang King John on the head to sign the Magna Carta to achieve the same effect for the English peasants. And later  the French peasants had to decapitate a few of the Aristocracy and later still the Russian peasants dispatched the Russian aristocracy in various ways to achieve the same ends. 

     I am not advocating such methods to resolve the sub-prime mortgage mess only pointing out that unrestrained capitalism is leading us in a dangerous direction. Our Canadian politicians are out there telling us that they can fix our world by applying more of the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place. We need a radical change in direction. 

    The one common factor among all Governments that have failed us in the past is that they have been male led and male dominated. My suggestion to you is, why not give the ladies a chance. They have governed so many aspects of or lives extremely competently since our societies started to organise themselves so why not let them take the lead?

     For my other ideas on voting for the feminine candidates see my post for:

    22 September 2008 ‘Would you vote for your Mom’

    24 September 2008 ‘Embracing feminine values’

It’s the environment stupid!

    Perhaps you will forgive me for paraphrasing that now familiar Clintonism but I find it so very apt for this Canadian Federal election.

    The looming environmental catastrophe must surely be the number 1 issue for our species but all we can think of, or perhaps I should say fixate on, is ecconomics. That is probably because we can percieve the current ecconomic situation as being a threat to our material well being as most of us have experienced ecconomic deprivation at some level. On the other hand we have no idea how the destruction of our enviroment is going to effect us because we have never experienced anything like it. A few of us have experienced the effects of a hurricane or the effects of a tornado touching down or a major flood but the destruction of our environment is beyond our comprehension. And so we put our head in the sand and pretend that it is not going to happen.

     The Europeans are much more in tune with environmental destruction having experienced two world wars being fought on their territory. As a result they are much further ahead in making the necessary adjustments to their lifestyle than we are here in North America. It also helps that they are naturally more restrained in their lifestyles.

     Make no mistake, the environment is our #1 Priority. We can survive a recession or two or even a depression with the advanced financial tools that we have at our disposal today for mitigating their effects. But once we reach the tipping point in global warming it is game over for our society as we know it. We cannot afford to be wrong on this one. 

    Not one of the major parties fighting this Canadian election place the environment as their #1 priority. The Liberals and the NDP have it as a second tier issue along with other issues. The business parties, The Conservatives and the Greens, have it as a third tier issue and for the Bloc in Quebec it ranks fourth. 

     If the environment tanks, putting 14 year olds in jail for life will probably mean a 5 year sentence after malaria, typhoid, diptherea, cholera etc, have taken their toll. Growth will be an impossibility in a shrinking world due to rising sea levels. Their will be no future to invest in for our children and Arts funding will be irrelevant when we are back to drawing on cave walls.

    The Government that you elect must be able to think past all this juvenile rhetoric and put in place concrete action plans to pull us back from the brink.

Yeah! we wanted a minority Government

    I have come to the conclusion that professional politicians have the misguided impression that minority governments are a mistake on the part of the electorate. They think that voters wake up after the dust has settled on an election and think “oops I elected a minority government”.

    Not being a professional politician but an average voter I can correct that illusion. Canadians as a whole have a collective intelligence and when we vote for a minority government that is exactly what we want.

      Take the 2006 Canadian Federal election for instance. The Liberal Party was in disarray having succumbed to the usual disease of political parties after a decade of almost absolute power, corruption. They were effectively leaderless and split along an ideological fault line.  The NDP after the same decade had lost their way and traditional support under Audry McLaughlin and had an untried leader in Jack Leyton.

     The Conservatives on the other hand were the only coherent political unit on the block after coming back from near annihilation with some careful papering over of their ideological cracks. The Reform faction had carefully hidden in the PC undergrowth. The drawback was that this patch and paste job had been masterminded by an astute economist, Stephen Harper, a man with the charisma of a toad.

    The Canadian voters quite rightly decided that none of the above could be trusted to run Canada on their own and so they elected a minority Conservative Government. That is, they wanted the Parliament to led by a Party that was internally organised but who needed to be watched like a hawk to prevent them from institutionalising some of their nastier right wing policies.

     In the 2 years since that election, nothing has change in the minds of  Canadians except that they would like some of the more urgent problems (health care for instance) to be fixed.The money that is being squandered on this unnecessary election could have helped to feed hungry children instead of the egos of politicians.

     So now we need a minority government that will do as it is told by the electorate.  As I suggested in my post of  24th. September, ‘Embracing Feminine values’, a government with a feminine bias should do the trick.

Do you really want to be poor?

    Most politicians will only deal with issues that are divisive. Crime and punishment, the economy, taxes, sovereignty, i.e, the masculine approach as in divide and conquer. Health care, which is a feminine issue is low on the priority listing in this election because the current political leaders do not want to commit to deal with it. It is too big and will detract from all the soft issues that make it easier for them to strut their stuff.

    The overriding issue of the 21st. century is the erosion of the rights of the Citizen in favour of the rights of the Corporation.

    This is the fundamental cause of poverty, declining quality of health care and education at an ever increasing cost, lack of social housing, failing infrastructures in our major centers of population, etc, etc. The list is extensive and the root cause, as I stated in my 18 September post “Get a job, loose your freedom”, is that the  corporate world refuses to take their fair share of the burden. The systematic reduction in business taxation results in higher profits which results in higher payouts to shareholders which results in money being diverted from the public purse to the private purse.

    The much vaunted ‘trickle down effect’ which is supposed to redirect the private funds to the lower paid segments of society does not work. Wealthy people spend their excess wealth on luxuries which are made by a small group of specialised companies and individuals who take their profits and join the Wealthy class and start to buy their own luxuries. And so the cycle continues with very little of the wealth trickling downwards.

    The other major issue for you, Generation Y, is the rate at which the Boomer generation is squandering you inheritance. Generation X is burning through this planets resources at an unsustainable rate.  In addition they are expecting you to decimate your future standard of living to keep them in the luxury to which they have become accustomed in their extended retirement. Freedom 55 is unsustainable unless you pay into Government and private retirement plans (by way of working to provide returns on investments) at 3 to 4 times today’s rates. There will be nothing left for your retirement or health care unless the Boomers pay up now to support their own retirement by working longer and paying more by way of contributions to government plans.

     The only way to have an influence on the changes being made by your Government is to have a say in who is going to be in that  government. You must get involved and vote for candidates who understand your issues not just the Boomer Generation issues.

Embracing feminine values.

  In my post of yesterday I proposed that we vote for what would essentially be a Government that was biased towards the feminine. I have support for this proposal in an article on page 1 of the Montreal Gazette’s ‘WORKING’ section on September 20th. Written by Donna Nebenzahl, this article tells us that once again the Scandinavians are way ahead us again. I seem to remember something about 50 year old Swedes being fitter than 30 year old Canadians in the 70′s.

     According to this article Swedish and Danish business leaders and academics have defined a leadership model that is particularly suited for a post-industrial knowledge economy (read Canada). In this model the dominant mode of thinking and decision making is intuitive or feminine. Family values are taken into account, more vacations, more paternity leave, the workday takes into account when people need to be home because both parents are working and parenting.

      Organisations based on this model offer a much more stable and balanced environment rather than the ‘tough guy’ North American model where there is nothing to counter the notion that profit is everything , you’ve got to win everyday. Winning everyday is behind the meltdown or the US Financial system because everytime someone wins, someone else looses.

      Feminine values are about belonging to groups, co-operation, innovation, sharing, all the things that are required to make a 21st. century organisation work effectively. They are also all the things that are needed to make a 21st. century Government work effectively.

   Canadians have been trying to tell the politicians that they wanted them to make the current minority based Federal Parliament work. That left or right wing ideologies are out, because they cannot resolve the current multi-facetted problems that we face. A Government with a feminine bias is what we need at this critical time in the planets history. The tough guy male is passe’.

     I need to correct an omission in my last post when I offered guidance on how to choose a candidate to vote for. I forgot to suggest to Quebec voters how to deal with Bloc candidates. The bloc is not a political party as such but a pressure group and therefore covers a wide political spectrum. However it has shown itself to be sensitive to ‘people’ issues and should therefore be placed on a par with the NDP.

Would you vote for your Mom?

   Following from my post of 18 September, the next question is “who can fix the problems?” and from that what needs to be done a is there anyone capable or willing to do anything?

    The Conservatives will not do anything because they do not see our dysfunctional society to be a problem. In fact it is the right wing policies that have created the problem.

    The NDP see the problem but think that the solution is to transfer the powers that corporatist right has, to the left instead of fixing the root causes.

    The Liberals are too busy fixing internal party problems to focus on the real issues and have fallen back on 20th century tactics of vote buying with policies that tinker with the mechanics of the situation and that will only maintain the status quo.

    The Green Party is too focused on the emvironment to be able to see the wide sweeping and radical reforms that are required to change the way we manage our society.

    So who can fix our problems? Would you trust your Mom to do the job? she has always been there to fix problems in the past so why not now. Well maybe not your Mom but someone like her or someone else’s Mom.

     For this election we have to look at all the candidates regardless of which party the represent and assess their qualities against those of your Mom. This is not a joke, I am totally serious about this one.

    A first good guess would be that any female candidate would be a good choice. If there are more than one female candidates on the ballot I would suggest that the one closest to the left of the political spectrum would be the best choice. The following ranking would be a good guide:

    1. NDP, 2. Liberal, 3. Green, 4. Conservative.

    If there are no female candidates on the ballot then the situation is more difficult and a look at the candidates backgrounds will be required. A candidates occupation or line of work may also be a good indication that they are people oriented rather than system oriented. Again, the following ranking should provide some guidance:

   1. Teacher, 2. Nurse, 3. Physiotherapist, 4. Chiropractor, 5. Dentist,

  6. Writer, 7. Journalist, 8. Lawyer

   Farmers should be chosen over Engineers or Computer Programmers and Accountants and Businessmen should be at the bottom of the list.

Get a job, loose your freedom.

    If you are younger than 25, chances are that you are still at college or university and do not have a full time job.That means that you still have a lot of freedom; physical and intellectual freedom that is. Make good use of this time because once you get a job the Corporate world claims your intellectual rights and a lot of other things that they have no right to.

   They claim the right to the use of your education but refuse to help to pay for it. (How many of you are holding down jobs and carrying large loans to pay for your education.) They claim the right to your physical presence in the workplace but won’t contribute to the cost of keeping you healthy so that you are able to be there. They claim the right to terminate your service when they feel your are no longer useful to them but take no responsibility for your non-productive(as defined by them) years.

   You may think that your high tech education makes you fireproof but the pace of change in technology means that your skills set will be obsolete 10 years after you graduate. If you wish to stay ahead of the current trends you will have to repeat the process several times in your lifetime. You will never be out of debt and therefore never be able to buy private health care let alone contribute to a pension plan or buy into the corporate world as an owner.

    Meanwhile the current Corporate owners of your intellectual property will be living in luxury. How did the Corporate world attain such dominance over the rights of the Citizen?

   It wasn’t like that 40 years ago when many of the Corporate owners were getting their education. They had subsidised or even free education. They had Government financed health care and subsidised pension plans. But in the 1970′s these same people decided that all this free stuff was holding back progess, that Corporate freedom and deregulation was needed to allow a great leap forward that would create wealth for everyone. Their plan was quite simple, to blackmail governments with threats to remove jobs, into curtailing all the support system that had been put in place over the previous 50 years to build a fair and equitable society. In the process they have become incredibly powerful and wealthy.  

    Once a human being has tasted riches they don’t ever want to be even a little bit poorer, so how do you fix the problem?